1. Introduction

On the first day of December 1904, the last day of a carefully planned urban utopia brought together people from many different places and backgrounds to experience the world’s fair for the last time.1 At least two-hundred-thousand people gathered on the grounds of the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition sharing mixed feelings of sadness, wonder, and nostalgia. Some visitors traveled a couple blocks to see the fair and its president David R. Francis for the last time. Others would soon be leaving the United States after seven months of transiting between cultural universes by walking. It was the so-called Francis Day: the grand spectacle of colors, shapes, tastes, and sounds was about to vanish from the city as if it never happened.

For the last time, fair officials marched from the administration entrance through Skinker Road. After stopping at the Administration building, Francis and other commissioners continued the march towards the Louisiana Monument at the core of the fairgrounds. Behind the monument, separated by the Great Basin, two of the main exhibit buildings, surrounded by thoughtfully designed water ways, contributed to a generalized sense of order.2 Francis, Governor Dockery, and other members of the local political elite stood in front of the north side of the monument and addressed the crowd with their closing speeches. Governor Dockery said that the fair’s lesson was made evident to every visiting foreigner: that the United States was “the greatest nation in all the world.” He also made sure to address the foreign commissioners gathered around the monument to warn them about an ongoing “war of peaceful conquest.” Said war, he argued, would prove to every nation in the world the United States’ economic and commercial supremacy.3

Figure 1: Area-focused map of the St Louis World’s Fair grounds. On Francis Day, fair officials entered through Skinker Road (bottom right) and followed through the outskirts of the Pike to reach the Louisiana Monument by the Great Basin. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/99466762/
Figure 1: Area-focused map of the St Louis World’s Fair grounds. On Francis Day, fair officials entered through Skinker Road (bottom right) and followed through the outskirts of the Pike to reach the Louisiana Monument by the Great Basin. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/99466762/

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, world’s fairs became the stages of planned urban utopia in which political and cultural groups negotiated their economic power, symbolic prestige, and modern collective identities.4 It is unlikely that the crowd heard what governor Dockery said in a world where microphones and amplifiers did not exist.5 If fairgoers did not hear it, however, the symbolic arrangement of the space echoed the governor’s words, and Francis and other American commissioners listened proudly while foreign elite representatives applauded. The fair in St Louis showcased a spatial narrative strongly dependent on the participation of foreign nations and other cultural groups to represent the “uneducated” and “uncivilized.” This article seeks to investigate how local newspapers perceived, experienced, and produced textual representations of a spatially oriented notion of modernity, based on a strong sense of otherness, that underpinned the arrangement of the fair.

Historians have often discussed how exclusionary principles of modernity, civilization, and progress underpinned the arrangement of world’s fairs. Robert Rydell’s work was pioneer in offering a social and cultural perspective on world’s fairs as symbolic universes that not only legitimized the hosting country’s political and scientific authority in the race for modernity, but also provided “a meaning for social experience, placing ‘all collective events in a cohesive unit that includes past, present, and future. (…)’”6 Those principles enabled fair visitors to experience a digestible version of the modernizing world of the turn of the century, one that necessarily required the objectification and visual separation of cultures in space. But the extent to which audiences received the message is yet to be addressed. As one particular kind of audience, cultural commentators like newspapers and magazines responded to visual presentations of modernity and to visitors’ spatial experience of the fairgrounds. In St Louis, during the months of the fair, local newspapers generated discursive representations of the participant geopolitical entities that reinforced an “imagined geography” of modernity centered around the United States.7

More recent scholarship on the fairs has pushed for a closer attention to how visitors and broader audiences experienced the fair and its ideological message. In 2009, historian James Gilbert wrote about the memory and experience of the fair in St Louis and suggested that scholars of world’s fairs have often described them from the perspective of the organizers and failed to consider common people’s experiences. Gilbert argued that fairgoers did not necessarily look at the fairs as symbolic universes of political and cultural legitimation and affirmation of national values.8 To understand the extent to which particular social groups successfully perceived underpinning narratives of modernity and otherness proved to be a complicated research task that is yet to be fully addressed. In response to dialectical interactions between discursive communities who negotiated their modern identities at the fair–in this case, fair makers, geopolitical entities, cultural groups, and visitors–, newspapers had the power to perceive, imagine, and produce representations of the world and said communities.

Some scholars have emphasized that the fairs were meant to win the hearts and minds “as well as the disciplining and training of bodies.”9 As organized spaces of cultural encounters and power relations, the expositions incentivized negotiation in the narrative dimension over each participant group’s view and experience of modernity. Anthropologist Burton Benedict’s investigation of the ritualistic dimension of the fairs stressed the competition between participating nations and intellectual elites during the events.10 In a similar direction, historian Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo’s examination of the Mexican representation in the material dimension throughout varied fairs suggested that geopolitical entities, in particular colonized nations, invested in fair exhibits to secure a spot in the stage of modernity. By focusing on how local newspapers, as a particular kind of audience, received the ideological message of the St Louis fair in 1904, this article understands the fair as a complex microcosmos of modernity embedded with ritualistic competition, contradictions, and tense power relations.

In fact, Governor Dockery was wrong about the war of peaceful conquest. The same evening of Dockery’s closing speech, three dead Igorrote bodies were shipped back from Missouri to the Philippines. The Igorrotes, an ethnic group native of the Cordillera Mountain Range in the northern Philippines, had been objectified and exposed at the fair as examples of uncivilized culture and died of pneumonia shortly after they arrived in St Louis in the spring. Their bodies were kept on the fairgrounds for months before fair officials cared to arrange their shipment back home, which finally happened on the last day of the fair. Along with those dead bodies, other sixty-nine alive Igorrotes headed back to their homeland the evening of Francis Day.11 They did not have the chance of congratulating fair makers for proving the United States superiority. The Igorrote’s tragic example encapsulates how the spatial narrative of modernity conveyed in St Louis depended on the otherization of different ethnic groups and geopolitical entities.

The underpinning message, its perception, and the cultural representations of the fairgrounds and exhibits are equally relevant to the understanding of the dynamics of power between geopolitical and cultural entities. Even though historians have accessed and examined personal letters, diaries, and other sources that shed light on how visitors experienced the exhibits, close reading of these documents often proved insufficient to assess the perception of broader ideologies embedded on the fairgrounds.12 In this sense, this article contributes to the field by attending to how cultural commentators perceived and talked about the Louisiana Purchase Exposition through the use of “distant reading” methodologies.

With a digitally driven argument, this article further contributes to scholarship on world’s fairs as symbolic universes in two ways: first, it demonstrates how methodologies of digital humanities like distant reading, word vector analysis, and named entity recognition can provide historians with new ways to assess the experience of fairgoers and whether visitors perceived the fair’s discourse of modernity. Second, it pushes for a closer attention to the role of newspapers as a particular kind of audience to the fair’s message: one that attends not only to the message, but to the ways in which other audiences perceive and engage with it. By considering and talking about the spatial experiences of visitors, newspapers produced complex discursive representations of participating cultures, and therefore, of the modernizing world.

“Open, ye gates,” and let them “learn the lesson”

In the morning of the last day of April, immediately before David Francis made official the opening of the world’s fair, Secretary of War William H. Taft, representing President Roosevelt, was trusted with the responsibility to give one final address to the thousands of people attending the ceremony. Taft said that the fair was “the union of nations in a progress toward higher material and spiritual existence.” But his speech emphasized that “the government of the Philippine Islands has felt justified in expending a very large sum of money to make the people who come here to commemorate the vindication of one great effort of American enterprise and expansion understand the conditions which surround the beginning of another.” The centennial of the Louisiana Purchase, he contended, marked “the beginning of the great Philippine problem”.13 After Taft’s speech, Francis sent the signal to the White House for Theodore Roosevelt to press the golden telegraph key that would provide electricity to the entire exposition. “Open, ye gates, spring wide ye portals,” said Francis, while urging visitors to “behold the achievements of your race: learn the lesson here tonight and gather from it inspiration to still greater achievements.” 14

The lesson to be learned within the gates was not only about the world’s achievements, but even more so about what made America so exceptional at the turn of the century. Late-nineteenth-century American historian Frederick Jackson Turner was right to suggest that any explanation of American history had to come to terms with the notion of the frontier and its implications. He contended, “the frontier is the outer edge of the wave – the meeting point between savagery and civilization.”15 Turner’s idealization of the American national identity as exceptional has been rejected in twentieth-century historiography, but indeed, as Thomas Bender has argued, throughout most of the nineteenth century, the American perspective on the Pacific and East Asia had much to do with the American expansionist ambitions towards the west.16 When Turner contended that the continental frontier was closed in 1893, American politics had already been concerned about the next chapter of the American history of expansion.17 The political and economic context prior to the turn of the century and the commemoration of the Louisiana Purchase in 1904 are key to the understanding of Taft’s statement and the centrality of the Philippine exhibit at the fair.

Turner did not deny that the American “energies of expansion” were to be directed overseas with the settlement of the Pacific coast. In fact, by the 1890s, he observed “the demands for a vigorous foreign policy, […] and for the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries” as symptoms of a continuity between the settlement of the West and a larger imperialistic movement abroad.18 The American colonial endeavors in the Philippines by the end of the century were the most ubiquitous evidence to the historical continuity that Turner observed. As Bender has pointed out, much similarly to the process of removal of the Native American people or the occupation and acquisition of Mexican territory throughout the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, the global extension of American culture was part of a much larger American imperial praxis justified by a common “message of uplift and modernization.”19 Given the unique complex aspects of each of these events as historical processes, a comparative analysis is nonetheless possible for it sheds light on the mentality of American politicians and fair makers regarding the Philippine people during the world’s fair of 1904.

If the early European rhetoric of empire and land appropriation was largely based on religious justification, by the late nineteenth century, the United States gradually sought legitimization for its imperial actions less on terms of American Christianism and more on economic development and notions of racial hierarchy. The Manifest Destiny, in Bender’s words, had become “as much a racial concept as a political one, about the rights (and responsibilities, too, it was believed) of ‘civilized’ nations to rule lesser, uncivilized peoples.”20 By the 1890s, and based on the racial and political premise of American superiority, the McKinley Administration used the unstable political circumstances in Cuba to get involved in the war against Spain and justify the annexation of Hawaii.21 Further, defeating Spain in the Spanish-American War in the name of “freedom” and Cuban independence resulted in the United States acquiring sovereignty over the Philippines as well as the territories of Guam and Puerto Rico.22

But the American lingering presence in the Philippines, in particular, did not come without controversy and domestic opposition. Anti-imperialist Americans often looked at racial hierarchy to argue against incorporation of allegedly inferior people since it would legally provide them with American citizenship status.23 Further, as historian Paul A. Kramer has demonstrated, during the U.S. Troops occupation of Manila, local compromises on the ground between American diplomats and Filipino insurgents caused tensions and diverged from what the U.S. State Department had envisioned for American sovereignty over the islands.24 A competition of state-building strategies between Filipino officials and U.S. commanders followed the Spanish defeat. To add to the complexity of the power dynamics at play, Filipino leaders often recurred to the language of “civilization” in seeking international recognition of the Revolution and Emilio Aguinaldo’s self-sufficient government. 25 If Aguinaldo and his diplomatic representatives could convince the United States of the civilized character of the insurgent Filipino government, they thought, the American troops had no reason to stay in control of Manila.

With the civilization rhetoric being a crucial strategy for self-determination and self-governance, Filipino leaders also needed to convince their own population, stratified in class and racial terms, that the civilized capacity of their people was ubiquitous in the islands. The problem of cultural representation was such a central matter that, in 1904, debates about whether to enable American diplomats to take Igorrotte

[TO BE COMPLETED]

Extracting Place Names

Between the first and the last day of the fair, The St Louis Republic, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch were three of the most important local newspapers reporting about and from the world’s fair. These newspapers were representative of a class of cultural commentators that established narrative hegemony about American culture and politics in the city of St Louis throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. By the turn of the century, the Post-Dispatch became a “thoroughly national newspaper” with broad interests in issues of national scale.26 The Globe-Democrat printed an average of five and one-half columns daily about the world’s fair between June 1901, when the organization of the exposition started, to December 1904, when it closed. Similarly, the Republic and the Post-Dispatch printed the equivalent of 1,012 and 988 pages respectively during the same period.27

As Cameron Blevins has argued, newspapers were amongst the cheapest and most available sources of geographical information by the turn of the century.28 They contributed to the production and shaping of space in the imaginary of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Americans by printing particular locations more often than others. During the seven months in which the world’s fair was open to the public in St Louis, those prominent local newspapers engaged, if unintentionally, in determining one imagined geography of modernity. Here, the emphasis on one is important for it reinforces that the cultural and discursive representation of modernity found in St Louis newspapers was only one possible representation in the midst of many others. The analysis of how those three newspapers produced space in response to the spatial narrative of modernity and otherness on the grounds of the fair suggests that the arrangement of the fair and its embedded ideological message reflected much larger issues of the time. It echoed complex decisions in American foreign policy and issues of colonialism and imperialism towards the Philippines.

The nature of the world’s fair as a microcosmic metaphor of modernity required me to move beyond Blevins’s search for the names of populated places. At the fair, the material culture in display serves as metaphors for the represented geopolitical entities, and every mention of nationality, culture, or ethnicity is intrinsically associated with a geographical place in the globe. For this reason, I made the methodological decision to count not only the actual place names that showed up in the sample of articles, but also every mention of national and cultural identities and material culture at the grounds of the fair that ultimately referred to the geopolitical entity represented on the grounds. So, for example, occurrences of “Brazilian” were lumped together with occurrences of “Brazil” since, even if the mention was referring to the Brazilian pavilion, or the Brazilian coffee, or the Brazilian committee, it was ultimately referring to Brazil for it was a participating entity at the fair, and therefore it contributed to shaping the imagined geography of modernity.

Of course, this approach comes with complications. Taking into account every mention of nationality and its variations in the corpus required a lot of close reading parallel to the distant reading methodologies.29 For example, the emergence of dubious terminology like “Indian”, which could either refer to the nationality of India or to Native groups represented at the fair, led me to investigate each occurrence on a case-by-case basis before assigning each mention geographical coordinates of a particular place in the world. Other cases where terms like “America” could refer to Latin America rather than the United States were also closely examined before the geocoding process. Further, close reading of a good chunk of the articles sample was important to understand particularities of the historical context of colonization in some cases, like a few occurrences of “German” referring to “German East Africa.” Similarly, in the wake of the Russo-Japanese war that happened simultaneously to the fair, mentions to the region of “Manchuria” were often associated to the Japanese exhibit. Where it seemed fit, I have decided to assign general latitude and longitude coordinates of present-day Inner Mongolia – the true geographical target of imperialistic and expansionist policies of the Russian Empire and the Empire of Japan.

Interventions to the data and the algorithmic process are a crucial component to humanistic inquiry that uses computational tools. In the words of Shanon Leon, when it comes to humanistic inquiry, most data sets cannot “stand on their own without clear and thorough documentation that accounts for the many decision points along the way.”30 Similarly, the methodological choices that led me to manually intervene in the automated process of named entity extraction are one fundamental aspect of what distinguishes this project as a work of digital history rather than a work of computer sciences or information technology. Further, Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell have argued in favor of the interpretive responsibility of humanists and historians engaging with text analysis and quantitative methodologies. They remind us that computational tools do not produce meaning they are rather meant to “facilitate the augmented hermeneutic cycle,”31 and in this sense, the automated process of extracting named entities would have been useless without human intervention based on thorough knowledge of the input data and its historical context.

After many interventions and data cleaning, the final data set of placenames contained 106 unique observations, each presenting one place name extracted from the corpus, the count, and its geographical scale (city, state, country, or region). As seen in Figure 2 below, the two most frequent place names were United States and Philippines, with 287 and 194 occurrences respectively. This result in itself significantly reinforces the core argument of this project: that the spatial narrative of modernity embedded on the grounds of the fair in St Louis was greatly dependent on the otherization of the East. It was indeed a comparative view of the world, like any other world’s fair: in order to showcase and praise the progress of the civilized West, it had to show its counterpoint.

Figure 2: Most mentioned place-names in the St Louis Post-Dispatch, The St Louis Republic, and the St. Louis Globe-Democrat during the months of the world’s fair.
Figure 2: Most mentioned place-names in the St Louis Post-Dispatch, The St Louis Republic, and the St. Louis Globe-Democrat during the months of the world’s fair.

  1. “Francis Honored Guest of World on Last Day of Exposition,” The St. Louis Republic, December 02, 1904.↩︎

  2. In his account of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, historian James Gilbert argued that the event reflected utopian ideals of the city. Although not always successful, fair organizers tried to present a controlled urban environment and impose a specific social and cultural order to the audiences. James Gilbert, Perfect Cities: Chicago’s Utopias of 1893 (The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 15.↩︎

  3. “Francis Honored Guest of World on Last Day of Exposition,” The St Louis Republic, December 02, 1904.↩︎

  4. In 1977, John Allwood wrote a comprehensive history of the World’s Fairs: John Allwood, The Great Exhibitions (London: Studio Vista, 1977). Other important scholarly references include Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vitas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851-1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988); and John Findling, Kimberly Pelle, Historical Dictionary of World’s Fairs and Expositions, 1851-1988 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1990).↩︎

  5. James Gilbert, Whose Fair: Experience, Memory and the History of the Great St. Louis Exposition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 8.↩︎

  6. Despite Allwood’s earlier contribution to the field, Robert Rydell’s cultural analysis and approach to the fairs has had a deeper impact in argument-driven interpretations of the fairs. In conversation with sociologists like Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, Rydell argued that the fairs were more than entertainment events and held deeper ideological meanings. Robert Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 2.↩︎

  7. I am relying on Cameron Blevins’ terminology and framework to understand how newspapers “print, and thereby privilege, certain places over others.” Blevins relied on Henri Lefebvre’s notion of space as a social construct and Edward Said’s idea of imaginative geographies.” He also took into consideration Benedict Anderson’s work on imagined communities. See: Cameron Blevins, “Space, Nation, and the Triumph of Region: A View of the World from Houston,” Journal of American History (June 2014): 122-147.↩︎

  8. James Gilbert, Whose Fair, 5.↩︎

  9. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (Abington: Routledge, 1995), 62.↩︎

  10. Burton Benedict, The Anthropology of World’s Fairs: San Francisco’s Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915 (Berkley: Scholar Press, 1983), 7.↩︎

  11. “Igorrotes on Way to Island Home,” The St. Louis Republic, December 02, 1904.↩︎

  12. Martha Clevenger edited an important account on the St Louis World’s Fair of 1904 and relied on visitors’ experiences as early as 1996. This interpretation was part of a broader historiographical shift in the last decades of the twentieth century towards individuals, groups, and classes that had been left out of mainstream historical narratives. Martha Clevenger, Indescribably Grand: Diaries and Letters from the 1904 World’s Fair (St Louis: Missouri Historical Society, 1996).↩︎

  13. “Secretary of War Lauds President’s Policy in Philippines,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 30, 1904.↩︎

  14. “Brilliant Opening of World’s Fair,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 30, 1904.↩︎

  15. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History, Originally published in 1920. Introduction by Andrew S. Trees (The Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading, 2009), 2.↩︎

  16. Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 220.↩︎

  17. Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations, 220-222.↩︎

  18. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Problem of the West” in The Frontier in American History, Introduction by Andrew s. Trees, 143.↩︎

  19. Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations, 206.↩︎

  20. Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations, 209.↩︎

  21. Office of The Historian, “The Spanish-American War, 1898”. https://history.state.gov/milestones/1866-1898/spanish-american-war.↩︎

  22. Office of The Historian, “The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902”. https://history.state.gov/milestones/1899-1913/war.↩︎

  23. Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations, 222.↩︎

  24. Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of The Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 96-97.↩︎

  25. Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of The Government, 100-101.↩︎

  26. Charles G. Ross, The story of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis: Post-Dispatch?, 1949), 7.↩︎

  27. Jim Allee Hart, A history of the St Louis Globe-Democrat (Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1961), 184-185.↩︎

  28. Cameron Blevins, “Space, Nation, and the Triumph of Region,” 128.↩︎

  29. For more on the methodological issues and decisions in the process of data exploration and curatorship, read the data biography document made available in the project’s repository in GitHub.↩︎

  30. Sharon Leon, “The Peril and Promise of Historians as Data Creators: Perspective, Structure, and the Problem of Representation,” [Bracket] (blog), November 24, 2019, https://www.6floors.org/bracket/2019/11/24/the-peril-and-promise-of-historians-as-data-creators-perspective-structure-and-the-problem-of-representation/, 10-11.↩︎

  31. Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell, “Text Analysis and Visualization: Making Meaning Count,” in A New Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman and et. al. (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2016), 345.↩︎